Let the punishment fit the crime?

This year, Highland Middle School in Anderson, Indiana purchased iPads as an enhancement tool for student education. Unfortunately, the teachers weren’t given a crash course on how iPads work before the tablets were introduced to the kids. One teacher at the school decided to take some topless photographs of herself on her iPhone and proceeded to accidentally sync her naked pics to one of the school’s iPads.

Inevitably, four boys borrowed the offending iPad, opened up iPhoto, found themselves confronted with their teacher’s boobs, and did what any 13 year old boys would do in that situation. They turned the iPad over to the administration so that other students wouldn’t see the photos. Wait, what…?

Alright, these may be the most honorable 13 year olds on the planet. So, of course, Highland Middle School recognized this and gave the boys the credit they deserved for not circulating their teacher’s naked chest all over the school.

Actually, no. One of the students was given a warning. Two were suspended. And the fourth was expelled.

Highland Middle School is defending the punishment, claiming that the students violated its technology policy. However, the school won’t explain how. While the school tries to figure out what, exactly, these kids did wrong, the rest of the country can be thankful that they don’t live in Anderson, Indiana.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Academics, life, Student Speech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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3 Responses to Let the punishment fit the crime?

As a parent of a 13 year old, it gets me pissed off just hearing this.

I was talking with my daughter about violence at school. She was telling me that if there’s a fight, and you take video of it with your phone, the school will expel you. What’s their reasoning? Well, according to her, it’s because you weren’t doing anything to stop the fight.

So let me get this straight, if I’m a 13 year old kid, and a bully picks a fight with my friend, and I elect to take video of it to prove what happened, then I’ll get expelled because I didn’t risk getting involved in the fight?

Some of the policies they put into place at schools are just fricken idiotic.

I find it interesting that “the school” hasn’t even tried to understand what the problem was – instead, they seem to have reverted to the “peasants and pitchforks” mentality when anything they don’t understand (or wish to?) happens in their jurisdiction.

I would be really worried if I were a parent or teacher – or student! All this seems to have done is allowed a knee-jerk reaction to define the competence of the school administrators – which is either scary (they just wanted to sweep it all under the mat, and didn’t bother to figure out who did what) or really scary (they not only don’t understand how the technology works, how it’s used, or how to manage its use, but they also don’t seem to have learned anything from their lesson about what can go wrong and why).

Mind you, I *do* wonder (as a 49-year-old 13-year-old) if there were any copies of said photo made… maybe that’s the part of the picture* that we’re not hearing?